Paul Davis: Newspapers not dying, not yet

Are newspapers in America dying? I keep hearing that on an almost daily basis. Newspapers are morphing. Large news-papers, particularly those owned by major newspaper chains are hurting. A few are attempting suicide.

What’s going on here? Newspapers by the hundreds have been gobbled up by huge chains which are interested primarily in the bottom line. Profits above all else. All newspapers have to produce profits, healthy profits. Those who do not produce healthy profits produce mundane products, too often heavily influenced by major advertisers. That is one of the ugly little secrets that exist within our industry.

Community newspapers are doing quite nicely, thank you, because they have not forgotten their mission, their responsi-bility to their readers, the service they must provide to their advertisers, their duty to report the good and the bad; to expose corrupt public servants who betray the public trust and seek to serve themselves first at the expense of the taxpayers.

Down through almost 50 years in this business I have owned all or part of six newspapers. I used to have a standing prac-tice of requiring every person who was involved in any way in the handling of a story to give me a written memo detailing why the story or item was kept out of the newspaper. This included the picture of little Johnny celebrating his first birthday party, to Uncle Bill bringing by the office an 8 foot snake he killed. He usually wanted us to make a picture of him grinning and holding the creature by the tail.

This week a man brought by a full typed page in which he told of his love and respect for a friend who had recently died. It was not written in the best of prose, but it was written from the heart.

He sort of missed the English language in quite a few ways as he sought my help to lead his soul speak for him. He talked of Saturday’s spent in the archives in Montgomery with his friend as they researched items of common interest, but he also talked of special nights cooking barbecue and other nights spent in the middle of the crawfish pond as a thunderstorm roared overhead.

Editing would have killed that letter. It was not edited. It was published.

I’m not older than dirt but it was discovered near the time of my birth. I can even remember going to my grandfather Davis’ house in Jemison, Alabama. The old home place ha two bedrooms and a path. An hour before supper every night he would hook the wires from his coveted radio to a car battery, plug in the antenna wire which ran 100 feet to a pecan tree and we would gather round for the evening news. Grandpa Davis soon found out he would need his newspaper because even if the radio brought the whole world into his living room. It took about two weeks to discover that he could no longer keep up with his friends who were dying for news of the state’s cotton and corn prices without his newspaper.

Then in the fifties Lucille Ball, Red Skelton and Ed Sullivan appeared in our living rooms on those tiny little black-and-white television sets, surely marking the end on newspapers forever. Along came Walter Cronkite, Chet and David adding faces to the instant news we had been getting in newspapers and on radio.

Usher in the world of digital news, the internet, blogs, MyFace, Myspace, MyNothing. Surely, most surely, this is the end of a great and noble institution, the nation’s newspaper.

Well, as once was said by a great writer, news of our demise have been greatly overblown. Newspapers that do not change to meet the challenges of the times are the only ones which will die. Newspapers which exist only to make money will die.

The Opelika-Auburn News has been billed for several years as one of the state’s faster growing newspapers in terms of circulation. One of the former great newspapers, The Montgomery Advertiser, is losing circulation and only recently lost its publisher.

One of the best newspapers in the state, The Birmingham News, recently lost its best reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner Brett Blackledge to the Associated Press. He is the gutsy reporter who dug out all the ugly facts about the corruption in Alabama’s junior colleges. Now, the Birmingham paper is the latest to announce staff reductions among its editorial staff. Less local news.

When you read a newspaper and find out you already knew 90 percent of the stuff on the front page, what is the justifica-tion for buying the reading the newspaper. Newspapers must be meaningful to attract readers. Good newspapers are filled with fresh stories and information readily available in one package.

And what about television? I don’t watch live TV. I record everything I want to watch. When I get home at 6 p.m., I watch the 5:30 NBS Nightly News. TIVO saved it for me. I watch it when I’m ready, without commercials. I zip through them. All of the favorite nighttime shows are watched one day late, while the gizmo on my TV records the current episode. Do you won-der why television runs 12 commercials in a row?

It’s because they can no longer charge their sky-high prices. They cut the prices in half and double the number of commer-cials. I ain’t buying and I ain’t watching the commercials.

Newspapers which have common sense will learn that it’s contents, period. It’s better local stories, better writing, better editing and better graphics. In short it’s what people want to know, packaged in a creative way. And, yes, it’s the good pack-aged with the bad. Take a pencil and circle the stories you find interesting and mark whether you considered them good news or bad news. In a good newspaper, the number of good news stories will always outnumber the bad. But there will be the bad. People will die in plane crashes, in the war and houses will burn and crooked politicians will be outed. That’s the nature of the business.

Are newspapers dying? No. But the ones which fail in their basic mission are committing suicide – slowly.

Paul Davis writes a column for the Sunday Opelika-Auburn News. You may contact him at pauldavis@bellsouth.net